Ya know what a lot of people say about me? They say that I’m different. The first person who said that to me was my second grade teacher, Mrs. LaGreca. Well, Mrs. LaGreca, I’ve found some statistical evidence backing up your theory about me.

Not long ago, I registered with www.librarything.com and cataloged 200 books from my collection. That’s the maximum number you can put up for free (you can put up more for a one-shot fee of $25; I may eventually do that). It represents about 2/3 of my overall book collection; I tried to select a representative sample, that reflects my reading interests and tastes.

Well, the “profile page” on librarything gives you a list of 50 or so other users whose library is most similar to your own (here’s the link to my page). It tells you how many books you share with those other users, and how many books they have total. I wanted to know what was the maximum amount of books that I shared with another person who has a library around my size, i.e. 200 books. The maximum number for that is 12, or 6% of my library (I share 33 books with one person, but they have 5,279 books!).

So I wondered how this compares with other people. To get a sense about that, I decided to look up about 25 or 30 other users with libraries around my size, i.e. 200, and see what their “maximum share” percentages are with other similarly sized collections. I tried to select these other users as randomly as possible, making sure that I didn’t overemphasize people having one particular predominant type of readership interest (e.g., religious books, adventure stories, romance novels, etc.). You’d expect them to have a lot of books in common with others like them. Well, I basically saw maximum overlaps in my selected sample of around 10 to 20%, with some going up to around 1/3 (again, between two collections each around 200 books). I didn’t do the math, but I’d guess that the average is around 15%. That would probably yield a statistically significant difference from my 6% maximum overlap with a similarly sized collection.

So there it is, folks. Mathematical proof that I’m a little more individualistic, a little more eclectic, a little weirder than most. And dang proud of it!

One final thing about books: I’m giving a free plug here to Better World Books. I bought a couple of former library books from them, pretty cheaply. They give good service, they give money away to support literacy campaigns, and they use low-carbon packaging to lessen their impact on global warming. I was quite happy to give some orphaned library books a home, via Better World.